


1000 other days to say...

by lejf



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, bit of dick touching but not enough to warrant an E, very indulgent.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-01-30
Packaged: 2018-09-20 22:12:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9518276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lejf/pseuds/lejf
Summary: What people did not seem to realise about Sam and Dean Winchester was that they had seen incarnation after incarnation after iteration that had eventually slumped into nothing but monotony. Stories were not often given without patience, yet, even in the absence of patience, they found themselves privy, occasionally, to the quiet revelations of the human heart.





	

There were two men on the docks and it was the middle of the night; the moon crested high, waning, waxing, imitating the tide to cut them in imposing figures while the clouds groaned and creaked aside to spill light.

There was an unmistakable authority in the first. He seemed to swell in his boots as the leather strained — not to hold _him_ , but the presence of him. A robust man with gritty sandy hair, of twenty, perhaps, with a solid set to his jaw and shoulders and tight muscle that shifted as he moved. The effeminate curl of his lashes did little to offset his body that could be described only as one of well-known and well-controlled power.

Atop the prowling beast were his eyes, crowned like the iron bolts on a crossbow. Eyes that looked, of all things, very _deliberately_. No glance seemed wasted nor without purpose, and so as he swept the lakeside, one could only wonder what under the waves could’ve interested him.

But, too, one could imagine, under the coloured lights of a crumbling dance, (the ways parties always did, unravelling at the edges as all things that were held together by absurdity inevitably did) that if those eyes merely flickered to anyone once, be it man or woman — best it be the prettiest there in the room, the one with the flamboyant ego or the one who cradled their own pathetic hope to their chest — they’d be indicative of a deeper longing, a whispered motive that each could spin to their own tale of wanton longing.

Under the water, for which he searched could’ve been demons, could’ve been fish, could’ve been the twisted tendrils of seaweed, the body of a drowned girl, or perhaps he was looking at the reflection of the moon and thinking of a sweetheart waiting somewhere back by the road with the rest of good civilisation. Whatever you wished.

That man, there, he stood with decade-old secrets and eyes like steel of swords. In them everybody saw what they wanted, but nobody saw through. Not even the boy beside him.

The boy, although it shouldn’t have been accurate to call him a boy, was laced too with the familiarity of strength grown into, but it seemed neither controlled nor languid. There was something in it so deeply frightening that it was only fair to be hidden away. It was kept restrained inside and he wrestled with it like an animal, snarling and spitting, and he choked it with his bare hands until they went white-knuckled and pale and gushed over with red.

Now his shoulders were tucked forward in memory and habit and the wisps of a terrible nightmare. Everybody had a monster crawling in their skin; it simply wasn’t common to recognise it nor condemn it.

That was why it wasn’t apt to call him a boy. The world saw him as one nonetheless.

There was a strange shuffling as the boy shed his layers. The other turned away, and the water carried noises of protest on little boats — meaningless decor to the surface, sharks beneath.

He slid in like a knife, moonlight glancing off his exposed skin. “Jesus, it’s cold,” Sam hissed. “You gonna come in?”

But Dean stood at the docks, and did not move.

“Come on,” Sam said, and they waited for a breathless moment — a moment, perhaps, in which both hoped for an intervening force, too afraid to coerce each other or speak directly. It was a continuation of an age-old battle, and all the while the water lapped at the shores, tipped into waves by the beat of Sam’s feet.

Sam was a gleam of ceaseless motion, but Dean did not come. In fact, Dean did not move at all. He stared out at the boy before him as though, in entering the water, he had become strange and foreign and that all of a sudden the shadow that lay beneath could be glimpsed, inside Sam, dark and insidious.

“Dean,” Sam said, plaintively, but Dean would not be reminded. He made to move, hinted at leaving in the tense of a calf. “Dean!”

His cry was like a lasso. Chagrin slashed Sam’s face as Dean halted, his momentary guilt like a shadow crossing the moon: ultimately meaningless and recurring.

“You know,” Dean said, and his fine-laced control revealed little. “I’m standing up a girl. Right now. All because you want to get your balls frozen off.”

“I know,” Sam said. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t think you are.”

Sam saw ahead of them a road, long and twisting, misty in its ending, and he clenched his jaw as though in defiance. “...What do you think I am, then?”

“You don’t wanna know.”

“I think I do, if your opinion of me is so low.”

“Sam–”

“Fine, okay,” Sam snapped, and silence coiled around them with intent. Sam’s eyes darted everywhere, unlike Dean’s which had settled steadily on Sam, seeing both above and below his shoulders in the sense that Dean saw more than people expected.

What people did not seem to realise about Sam and Dean Winchester was that they had seen incarnation after incarnation after iteration that had eventually slumped into nothing but monotony. Stories were not often given without patience, yet, even in the absence of patience, they found themselves privy, occasionally, to the quiet revelations of the human heart.

Dean would find himself hearing the words of a woman with the bottle stripping away her walls; or she who woke the next morning to bestow him with a solemnity of “I’m leaving” although _he_ was the one half-out the door, and smoking a cigarette in the beginning-gloom, more ephemeral than the wisps that left her lips and were carried away out the windowsill.

Whereas Sam and his gracious eyes, his gentle hands... or perhaps the gentleness of him wasn’t what attracted all the garrulous souls. Perhaps it was the edges of him, those that had forced his darkness into submission — that was what pulled people towards him and slit them open to reveal every insecurity and fleeting elation.  

And, while there was a threshold to which a single man could stand to hear, a limit to the enthusiasm for the tales of lives not theirs’, there was no amount of looking toward each other that would fill their share. They eternally hungered for truth because they lived each other’s lives, and not one man would ever understand his own life as such.

They could peer in through windows and carry away fragments of others’ in the deepest of pits or the highs of orgasm — Dean could pin down a woman’s emotion in half a beat. But their own lives were shaded, and that was why, when Dean looked towards his brother and caught all the anguish roiling beneath, he could see no further and was beached on the shallower layers, the layers of growing muscle and physical beauty.

So he looked away.

This, narrowed down, simplified, twenty years, was a glimpse of what lay behind Dean Winchester’s gaze.

“Come on, Dean,” Sam said again, more gently. “There’ll be another girl in another place. There’ll be a thousand other days. It’s not that bad.”

“If you think I don’t respect my lays just ‘cause there’ll be others, Sam, you’ve got something wrong.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t mean any of it like that.”

“Of course you didn’t.” But you don’t want to talk about it. I don’t, either, so it’s all fine.

Once again, they were swallowed by silence. Sam must have been remembering the countless times he’d been stood up and waiting outside the theatre, or the prom.

Stood up because Dean had stolen his girlfriend and fucked her over the hood of his car.

Sam said, “Alright,” in that quiet reserved way of his, and took a deep rattling breath which reminded Dean of how people breathed between sobs. With a kick the boy disappeared beneath the starry surface.

Dean was yet very still, looking out over the lake and chewing on the bones of an argument. He looked up to the moon for guidance, perhaps. The moon shed light for lost travellers. It howled down the wolves, and it turned all the weres into monsters. It was apt.

Whether he had truly turned to look at the moon as a symbol of enlightenment, darkness, femininity or the rhythm of time, it didn’t seem to matter. The jacket went first, shirt thereafter, jeans and socks and shoes and there wasn’t a moment of hesitation before Dean plunged in with a cord still around his neck.

Sam’s laughter was brighter than any peal of bells. Sam was a contradiction in and of himself; anyone would tell you that Sam promised gaiety in every word of his earnest speech, implicitly, merely in the way he would look at you with such devotion and hope it was impossible not to be ballooned up on the weight of his conviction. Yet the jaggedness to him promised away naivety.

Without a doubt, Dean knew that if he were to fall in danger, Sam would dreg up the blackest parts of himself and rise, soulless, darker than the shadows that were cast against the trees.

They circled each other like two sardines, slipping into and out of each other’s reach, both too careful to touch and only catching the gleam of wet skin, pale skin, skin that was usually hidden beneath layer after layer. The ritual went like this: they would fall into silence, and let the world drop away.

It went like this: Sam would slump over by the bank of the lake, still dripping from head to toe and eyes brighter than they had any right to be, and Dean would slide up to him, slow and sinuous, emerging from the water to glide his hands up Sam’s calves, his thighs, to rest his thumbs in the hollows of Sam’s growing hips.

Dean had known it would end like this, and he thought that Sam must’ve known, too. And that was why they both knew Sam was not sorry.

Sam’s body would be under Dean’s control for the night, twitching as Dean breathed over his skin, arching as though twisting forwards for an unattainable, momentary ecstasy.

If Sam drummed his palm thrice on the stones, that would mean it’d be called off. If he didn’t– if he fisted his hands in Dean’s hair like he did now, jaw clenched to keep his cries in, then Dean would continue tonguing just underneath the head of him, and Dean would continue running his tongue over Sam’s skin, and his hand would gently tug his balls.

They wouldn't speak of it tomorrow. They didn’t speak; that was the unwritten rule. Speaking would make it real, and to make it real was to acknowledge the fear it chased away.

The easiest way to finish Sam was to pull him up until they mouth-to-mouth, eyelids already fluttered shut, somehow skimming over the step where they had to glimpse each other’s eyes, and wrapping a strong hand around them both, breathing into Sam’s mouth in the implication — the suggestion — of a kiss. If their lips touched, and Dean’s tongue flicked out to trace the seam of Sam’s mouth– Sam would lock up, and he’d be coming between them as though his physical sacrifice could keep them closer together.

When he spoke again, the next morning, his mouth would be bloody from biting his tongue for silence.

Before then, Dean would fist himself with the heat of Sam against him and he’d follow soon after, helplessly, two boys fooling themselves to assuage their twin, eternal fears: the fear that some new wonder, a radiant satellite tilting in orbit, would stray in too close to their worlds and eclipse out an entire lifetime of devotion. That they would fall out of love — any kind of love.

(But for a moment Sam both caught the memory of something, a reassurance, nebulous, the tune of a song forgotten, just out of reach — sentences that could allay everything and anchor them in place. It was right there, brilliant like a thousand futures.

He raised his eyes and saw his _brother,_ strong and gorgeous. His _brother,_ who was elusive to all that ever tried to understand and control him.

And so it was gone, and he never did see it again. Not once in his lifetime.)

**Author's Note:**

> do you like eclipse mints? i think they're pretty good


End file.
